To any of our Real Athlete Blog readers who feel that they're tired of hearing about the troubles of new Philadelphia Eagle Michael Vick, I apologize for perhaps adding to your pain. However, I've had this message tugging at my heartstrings for a few days, and now that I'm able to make this entry, I'm going for it.
Actually, I'm not going to focus directly on Michael Vick in this piece. Instead, I want to talk about how the business of sports sets itself (and the rest of us) up for disappointment when superstar athletes make poor life choices off the playing field.
I'll start with this: the purpose of sports marketing is essentially the same as the purpose for marketing any other types of products. Since sports constitute a major category of commerce in this country and around the world, sports marketing is charged with promoting the business interests of sports. That automatically translates into brand imaging and the perception management activities associated with spreading favorable product perceptions among the customer (fan) base.
Obviously, then, top-level athletes are products, and if they have a big enough name, they're brands unto themselves. When they reach the level of being considered a brand, clearly that status is accompanied by huge capital and other types of investments in such superstars. Largely due to the influence of marketing messages that emphasize the upside of being a high profile superstar brand, the fans tend to confuse athletes' images with who they really are as people.
Here's the problem. Because of the nature of how top athletes need to use the 24 hours that they have each day (like the rest of us), they need to spend a relatively large portion of their waking hours training and otherwise taking care of their bodies, and also studying the fine points of their sports so that they can realistically expect to win championships and so forth. Fortunately for the athletes who have good support networks assisting them with other aspects of their lives, they can get sound advice to help them make appropriate decisions about how to behave in a wide variety of off-the-field situations.
Unfortunately, however, because the commercial side of sports leads to the vast majority of our athletes receiving so much praise at young ages because of their athletic abilities while the quality of their characters is ignored, the kinds of decisions athletes make off the field often don't even make it into sports conversations unless there's a legal problem. And since the athletes don't receive much feedback or training in character-building principles, they have no reason to consider it important to their success unless they've been blessed to be members of strong families that promote good character. Well, as we all know, with all of the challenges facing American families these days, we certainly can't count on most athletes automatically having strong family structures in place for them to grow up in.
Besides, character-building isn't something we can afford to leave to chance. All athletic institutions need to step up and take on a large portion of the responsibility for helping players develop a healthy balance in their overall lives.
The bottom line at this time, though, is that there's a major disconnect between how the sports marketing business necessarily portrays superstar athletes and how individual athletes balance their lives on and off the field. Sports marketers know that fans expect top athletes to consistently demonstrate fierce, cutthroat competitiveness on the field, but to instantly tranform into saints off the field. So that's the brand imaging that bombards the media marketplace.
The question is, how realistic is it to praise and pay a human being millions of dollars for displaying killer instincts while doing his job, and then turn around and expect him to morph into Mother Teresa as soon as he takes his uniform off? Until character-building becomes a major requirement of sports programs at all levels of our society, athletes will spend the lion's share of their time trying to perfect their playing skills, and hardly any time trying to perfect their characters.
It's just as much our fault as it is theirs, too. We love to be entertained by exceptional athletic feats, but we don't bother to question whether the person who made that incredible play during the game is able to make equally great decisions about everyday life issues. If we were to push our athletes to develop this kind of life balance during their developmental years in their sports, I'm sure that we'd see more athletes emerging from professional sports pipelines with an already cultivated ability to make excellent life choices.
Until we as athletic community members and sports fans demand that character-building be part of all youth sports programs, in the future we're almost certain to see more sports superstars like Michael Vick making bad decisions simply because at the time when they make that foolish choice, they're clueless about how big of an impact the outcome is likely to have. Therefore, I want to end this message by issuing a challenge to all of us who play any kind of role in the sporting world. Let's demand the infusion of character-building programs in sports programs on the front end, so that we can minimize the need to punish poor decisions on the back end!
Peace and blessings to you all.
